Exit stage up.

There it is again. Hear it? That creaking noise. Yeah, yeah... that one. Is that your astronaut couch or one of the main support beams holding this clunker together. Don't be in a hurry to answer that.

Oh, hi, Web-based readers, listeners, and curiosity seekers. It's your old pal Big Green, out here in deep space, fresh off a thrashing series of gigs on Kaztropharius 137b - one of the few places in the known universe where our music gets played, bought, and reviewed - and headed in the general direction of home. Yes, we've had it for the time being. After all, the holidays are coming, daylight savings time has ended (spend all that saved-up daylight yet?), and darkness is falling across the northern hemisphere of our tattered planet. It's at this time of year, more than any other, that the sojourner's thoughts turn to hearth and home, and certainly we of Big Green are no exceptions. Many's the time I've repaired backstage (what the hell, you can hardly repair onstage - it's distracting to the audience!) and, in the privacy of my own musings, longed for the dank closeness of my squathouse bedroom back in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Mildew, dear mildew....

Whoops. I apologize. Didn't mean to get all sentimental on you. Deep space will do that to a man. (Also to a man-sized tuber, as it happens.... could be all about the size, actually.) Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) seems to be feeling the effects after just a few weeks in space. The other day I saw him looking at photos of the Coke machine at the corner drug store. (You know, they really hit it off.) And then there's the holidays or, as we call them, the FREAKING holidays, with which our group has been more than tangentially associated. What the hell, I mean.... how many alt-indie rock bands do you know whose first album was a collection of original songs written around the idea of Christmas? More than one... really? There was that Boston band called "Christmas" back in the 1980s, but that doesn't count. (Neither does the L.A. bar band called "Big Green". Coincidence, I tell you!) Anywho, we've been putting our best minds on how to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the release of our album 2000 Years To Christmas, and thus far... no great ideas. None yet, anyway. Just a recognition that we're out of money and it's time to roll back to the mill.

One of the better bad ideas thus far was piped up by the newest member of our contingent, Benjamin Franklin, who has been tagging along since our visit to the bizarrely time-scrambled planet Earth on the other side of a time-space wormhole (look back a few columns, you'll see it). "Fynde thee a performance venue, and render your music within!" he said, which, roughly translated, works out to be ... book a gig somewhere and play a bunch of music from our now 10-year-old first album. Yeah, not bad for a founding father. Still... that would require some effort on our parts, and looking around this crew cabin, I don't see a lot of motivation. Matt, you in for this? How about you, Johnny? sFshzenKlyrn - any interest from the man from Zenon? Don't all speak at once! Sorry, Ben.... this idea is going to take some developing. Let's just say that it was probably easier to convince the landed gentry in colonial America to revolt against the world's most powerful empire than it would be to get these fuckers on board with some Christmas gig. I'm just saying.

So maybe that creaking is just my attitude. I hope so - service stations are a little thin on the ground out here in interstellar space.